Bill Walters

Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1937, Bill graduated from Grandview Heights High School and attended the Ohio State University where he was a fine arts major hoping to get into advertising or cartooning. Among his many mementos are a drawer full of rejection slips from The New Yorker and Playboy. He was introduced to show biz by volunteering to design the scenery for a friend's student production. He worked on the art staff of the OSU Motion Pictures Department and the University TV station, WOSU. In 1963, after the usual summer stock assignments, he arrived in New York City, where he worked at NBC as a page and as a production assistant. He became a backstage jack-of-all-trades with The New York Shakespeare Festival, The Playhouse of the Ridiculous, and many other regional and off-Broadway theater groups. In 1966 he was hired by Peter Schickele as the stage manager for PDQ Bach, and became known as the irascible and irritable but always efficient apologist for Professor Schickele's satiric presentations of the infamous "Evening of Musical Madness". Despite his crusty on-stage persona, Bill was for 50 years the technical coordinator, production manager, road manager, and the REAL stage manager of the series of concerts that had its first public performance in 1965 at Town Hall in New York. He used to work for Gray Line New York Sightseeing as a tour guide riding a round on the top of a double-decker bus telling lies about New York City to gullible and unwary tourists. Bill has finally retired from active work in concerts, theatre, movies and TV, but continues his wannabe specialty: writing unproduced plays and film scripts.